Coyote Comms: Justification through Misinterpretation - Transcript
Note: The provided lines are taken directly from the script. It has a near perfect correlation to the video. SpaceGuru5. Time to see who else I’m gonna wind up pissing off today. Who’s it gonna be this time? Last time, I pissed off the PC culture. I wonder who’s up next. (Text: Feminists) SpaceGuru5. Oh, boy. This oughta be exciting. Zed. No, Gilbert! Stop! Stop right there!Zed's first appearance. SpaceGuru5. Zed? What’re you doing here? I haven’t even come up with a character intro for you yet. Zed. I don’t care! Listen to me, Gilbert, you don’t know what you’re doing! SpaceGuru5. I know what I’m doing. I’m just gonna commentate on an extreme feminist. Zed. You don’t understand. If you make any sort of comment that is critical of feminism in any way, they will come after you like rabid dogs to a helpless game fox! They will hurtle all kinds of insults at you that I don’t think you’ll be able to handle! SpaceGuru5. Come on, you know it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been called all sorts of harsh names. I’ve dealt with it before. Quite well, might I add! Zed. You didn’t seem to handle it so well when it happened to you a year ago. SpaceGuru5. Hey, look, that was personal, not online! Zed. (sigh) Look...just be careful. I don’t want you to be hurt. SpaceGuru5. I’ll be fine, Zed. Like in my last commentary, I’m gonna avoid using any kind of derogatory terminology and just tell it like it is. Zed. Very well...but don’t say I didn’t warn you. (Door closing sound effect.) SpaceGuru5. Sheesh...Well, anyway, on with the video. (Intro sequence. The music is "Toccata avanti la Messa della Domenica" by Girolamo Frescobaldi.) SpaceGuru5. Hey guys. SpaceGuru5 here. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t support equality, because I do—''if my last commentary is any indication.'' I think that everyone, no matter who they are, should be allowed to have equal opportunity to get somewhere in life. As a matter of fact, I don’t see people for what makes them different from me; I instead see them as people. However, if there’s anything our current society is doing, it’s showing that some people would rather we regress under the guise of progress. While this applies to quite a few people, I’m going to focus on a rather notorious group: Feminists. Now, don’t get me wrong; I know that plenty of feminists really do want equality. However, that doesn’t change the fact that there are radicals who think that equality means women should be completely dominant over men, as a response to the ages of women being dominated by men. These are people who tend to call out the most minimal things for being sexist, even if most of the time they aren’t sexist at all. Though there are plenty of examples of this behavior on YouTube and elsewhere, today I’ll focus on the user marinashutup. Her videos discussing feminism range from promoting things like #FreeTheNipple, which ignores the fact that breasts are technically genitalia and are thus censored just as much as penises and vaginas, to daring to say that Hogwarts houses have genders to them. No, seriously. She said that. marinashutup. So I started thinking about how there tends to be gender gaps in many subjects in colleges, and this made me wonder that, if gender gaps exist in educational fields in the Muggle world, if there would be gender gaps as well in the houses at Hogwarts. Like, if certain houses value certain traits that tend to be associated with different genders, would there be disproportionate rates of men and women in different houses? SpaceGuru5. See? However, today I’ll be looking at her video discussing a certain narrative trope that she has a problem with. Apparently, she has a problem with the classic underdog story just because it features a man who shows up a woman who is arguably talented and skilled. What will she say about this narrative trope? Well, let’s tune in and start slicing away. (Text appears against a black background. It disappears at the end of the spoken paragraph.) SpaceGuru5's Text. DISCLAIMER: Don't be a dick just because you may not agree with her (or me); she can express her opinion just as much as I or anyone else can, so I ask that everyone be civil. SpaceGuru5. Before I begin, I’d like to say that I don’t encourage anyone to cyberbully this particular YouTube user. She’s just expressing her opinions, and she can do that just as much as I can, so I kindly ask that everyone be civil in regards to what may or may not happen here. Now then, on with the commentary. marinashutup. I started thinking a lot about common narratives that you see repeated constantly in television and film and novels. So one narrative that really grinds my gears is the trope of a capable woman who’s really qualified and an expert in her field being passed up and overlooked for an incompetent, mediocre, usually white man who’s way less skilled than her, way less knowledgeable, but for some reason he’s the one who takes charge and gets to save the day. And basically, you can see this trope pretty much everywhere, repeated over and over and over again, in everything from Guardians of the Galaxy to Ant-Man to Harry Potter to even fucking Kung Fu Panda. SpaceGuru5. Ignoring the fact that you grossly and blatantly misinterpreted all of these movies by applying a false generalization, let me tell you about what it means to be a protagonist. The protagonist is the character around which the story unfolds. We often find protagonists engrossing when they’re given qualities that everyday people can identify with. They become engrossing because events in the story can show us what we can become under certain circumstances. The purpose of having characters who already seem to know everything, only to be upstaged by someone deemed inferior, is to show that even the most knowledgeable still have much to learn. We don’t do this to be incendiary; we do this because we can learn a lot from fiction. If anything, you’re the one being incendiary by insisting that only people who already know a lot should be the ones worthy of being the protagonist, and in your case, it’s women. marinashutup. Like, he’s literally this bumbling incompetent loser panda who just shows up one day and he gets to be the chosen one and save the day over Tigress, who has been training for this her whole life, and by all intents and purposes, she should be the one saving the day, but he gets the opportunity to do this by simply showing up and wanting to do it. SpaceGuru5. No, no, no, and even more no. In the movie, Master Shifu holds a tournament for the Furious Five to determine who the Dragon Warrior is, because he, too, thought that the Dragon Warrior would be someone skilled and capable of fulfilling such a role. However, when Grand Master Oogway wound up choosing Po instead, everyone was baffled, even Po himself. However, throughout the course of the film, he is trained by Shifu and the Furious Five in order to fulfill his potential, and that’s how he, with help from the Furious Five, is able to save the day. So it’s not so much a matter of circumstance as much as it is one of determination and accomplishment superseding appearance. Way to misconstrue something to suit your own misguided ideas. marinashutup. Another aspect of this trope is when the more qualified female character questions the male protagonist’s authority, she’s usually portrayed as being narcissistic or uptight or bitchy or some other negative character trait. SpaceGuru5. The reason why this portrayal exists is because it shows that people can be cruel to those they deem inferior. This makes them more believable as characters because it shows that they have imperfections that make them more like real characters. If you had a character who was just accepting of things that opposed their world view and never displayed any negative traits, people wouldn’t generally think that character would be flat and, thus, uninteresting. You act as though the only thing we do in this society is downplay women and boost men. Sorry to say, but the way things are right now, men are now at a historical disadvantage of opportunity when compared to women...but that’s a story for another day. marinashutup. And the way they get around the less competent, capable dude being the person who saves the day or gets the job or the incredible opportunity is that he usually has some magical intangible quality that makes him destined or fit to be the one who leads and takes charge. So it’s either his destiny or he’s the chosen one or it’s in his blood or he has some weird magical connection with the dude who killed his parents and gave him a weird scar on his forehead. Sometimes, it’s all of these things…except for the last one; that’s pretty specific. SpaceGuru5. You think that’s bad? How about Sailor Moon? Serena, the protagonist, just happens to be a reincarnation of the Sailor Scouts by some magical coincidence, and thus she becomes one of the heroes who saves the day, and she started out as a total airhead who still had a good personality. Of course, as the series progressed, she got smarter and accepted her responsibility, thanks to the plot devices I mentioned before, but the point is that this same trope has occurred with the female gender and can just as easily be misconstrued like the way you’re misconstruing the trope you’re discussing here. How you fail to realize this is something I’ll never know. God, I can’t believe you actually got me to defend Sailor Moon... marinashutup. I think what’s really frustrating about this trope is that it’s not just something that happens in fictional narratives, but it’s something that you see reflected in real everyday life. Equally qualified or more qualified women are passed up for equally qualified or less qualified dudes simply because they’re assumed to be more competent. And there have been studies done where there are two identical applications. Only difference is the gender of the name, and the one with the man’s name gets more callbacks than the one with the woman’s name simply because he’s judged to be more competent and valuable and worthwhile. SpaceGuru5. ...which is why we have terms like mansplain'mansplain' v.(of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing. (OED) to reflect that train of thought. And what kind of applications are you talking about? If you’re talking about job applications, the employers only have a limited amount of available positions to fill in, so they choose their employees based on performance more than anything else. Although things like prior experience and formal education make those chances more likely for specialized high-paying positions, the only thing that really matters is how well a person can perform in and adapt to their environment. It’s not just in jobs where this happens either; it happens in the military, public schools, Government facilities, construction sites, and many other parts of our infrastructure. Now, if employers are choosing more men to be employed because of perceived competence, then that’s one thing. However, people are generally hired based on how well they perform instead of who they are as people. At least, in theory this is what happens; Affirmative Action is quickly doing away with that. Sorry to burst your bubble. Not really. marinashutup. I think what’s dangerous about this trope in media is that it’s so common that it’s basically rendered invisible, and we don’t even notice it when it happens. I’m gonna bring Star Wars into this just because I want to. In the new Star Wars film, in which the force is awakened, people were literally complaining about the female protagonist Rey being able to use the force and wield a lightsaber too quickly and becoming skilled at it in a way that was ‘unbelievable,’ even though that is literally the Star Wars franchise and many other male characters have done that and it’s never questioned, but when it’s a woman it’s unbelievable, because how can she naturally be good at things? SpaceGuru5. Isn’t that what the movie Mulan did to show that female characters can be skilled at things, too? Not to mention, the only people who complained about Rey’s role were just people who cared way too much about the franchise and only saw it in nostalgic tunnel vision. These are people who are in the minority that took the film way too seriously, though here you’re treating them like they’re the majority; you just made it seem like everyone reacted this way, when really it was only a vocal minority speaking out about it. Making flagrant hyperboles by inflating minute details to make it seem like you have a point doesn’t make your point any stronger. If anything, it makes it more likely to implode on itself. Have you learned nothing from what happened to Guptill89? marinashutup. So frustrating. Just so frustrating. It just seems like men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas women are assumed to be incompetent until proven otherwise. And even the women who are talented and skilled and competent just don’t have that special quality that men seem to do. SpaceGuru5. Again, we apparently have mansplain in the dictionary now because of people like you who think that everything is sexist just because you think it is. Also, let me tell you how frustrating it is to be confronted with the stereotype that men are violent and dangerous and women are meek and unassuming. Because of this stereotype, we have the double standard in which women feel like they can beat the crap out of men all they want, but if a man does the same he will be faced with near excoriation. Let’s also not forget the time when a man reported having a female stalker to the police, only to have the police not take his report seriously until it was almost too late. How do you explain something so completely biased like that? Don’t pretend men aren’t faced with double standards either, because they are. And that’s the way this roadrunner runs. As many people have pointed out, the way we treat people in this society has gotten quickly out of hand. However, it’s not the people that some people seem to think; it’s people who have historically been in higher power and oppressed the people who are now getting the privilege they claim the historical oppressors still have. I see this as a major problem because it’s only inflammatory and based on emotion. As you might be able to tell, the theme for these commentaries is about people who think that equality means favoring some groups and demonizing others while still playing the victim. Now, I know that the system here isn’t always perfect; I know that some facilities are discriminatory in the way that most people seem to think. However, the solution isn’t to place the discrimination in the opposite direction; the solution is to just move on from the past and work towards a future that’s beneficial for all of us. Thinking backward is not the way forward, and until we stop thinking backward, we’re only gonna be going backward. It’s time to shift the gears into Drive and get out of the parking lot. That’s about it for today, folks. I’m SpaceGuru5, and I’ll see y’all later. (Outro sequence. The music is the ending of "Little Fugue in G Minor" by J. S. Bach.) Notes Category:Transcripts